Bush on 9/11/01: maybe just a figment of the imagination

Monday, September 11, 2006 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
E.J. Dionne / Syndicated columnist

WASHINGTON — The events of Sept. 11, 2001, are personal to every American. The day was not about politics or partisanship or elections. That's why the country, divided more or less 50-50 on political matters the day before the terrorist attacks, immediately drew together in sorrow, solidarity and determination. The rest of the world stood with us.

Five years on, you look at the rancid state of our politics, the decline in America's standing in the world and the behavior of our national leadership, and you want to shed tears for your nation. This year, so much of what's being said about the events of 9/11 is about the political survival of the Bush administration.

Our household's personal ties to that day pass through a neighborhood arrayed along the Atlantic Ocean in Rockaway, Queens, where my mother-in-law and two of my wife's brothers live.

That middle-class community is the home of many firefighters and police officers, and a large number of midlevel employees of companies that happened to be housed in the World Trade Center buildings. In Rockaway, terrorism is not an abstraction.

Something missing in your skyline, we learned, can be as powerful a presence as something that's actually there. My kids always knew we were about to get to grandma's house when we crossed the Verrazano Bridge from Staten Island to Brooklyn. One of them would inevitably shout out, "The Twin Towers!" Whenever we cross that bridge now, the silence in the car and the absence of those buildings are a memorial to a day of pain and outrage.

Because 9/11 was experienced so personally, divisions melted. In our household, and surely in millions of others where President Bush was not exactly a political hero, my wife and I instructed our kids that all of us should wish him well and hope for his success.

For a while, Bush himself changed. He abandoned unilateralism in pursuit of a broad international coalition against terror. He cooperated with Democratic leaders, transforming a partisan administration into a coalition presidency. Perhaps Bush would follow the example of that unifying Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

History did not unfold that way.

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